Merle Porter (1907-1988) was a one-man postcard production company, producing and distributing millions of cards over a 50 year career. Nearly always about places, his cards have a distinctive style, sometimes depicting famous sites, but more often they celebrated the ordinary landscape: highways, abandoned buildings, oil fields, small town downtowns. He wrote descriptive captions for the back of each card, full of historical facts and local lore, sometimes filling up more than half of the card's writing space with his text.